by Judy Blunt
My father avoided the nests and the scurrying wildlife as best he could. i A solid hit that resulted in an explosion of feathers or porcupine quills, or worse yet, the reek of skunk, not only ruined hay, it usually put the mower down for repairs. Though he was more likely to grumble about the inconvenience and expense, he would cut a wide path around a nesting bird if he saw it in time. He'd stop the tractor and walk ahead if he thought something was hiding in the uncut hay. In the process of keeping track of the meadows all spring, he'd know where the white-tail deer were hiding, their fawns dropped just as the alfalfa began to bud. Entering a new meadow, he watched the margins of the field for a nervous doe, her alert, tail-twitching, hoof-stamping dance a sign that the mower was entering the field where her fawns hid, hardwired to lie flat and still in the very teeth of danger. The fawns that broke rank early and ran, lived. Others held to instinct, trusting their spotted skin to make them invisible, and sadly, it often did.
I raised one of these to weaning size, a small doe fawn that jumped up too late and lost a hind foot to the sickle blades. Baby rabbits we captured in the woodpile or rescued from the cats and kept in little cages. The baby skunk crawled from beneath the chicken house, blind and hairless one day, hours after its mother was shot raiding the nests. I named the little creature Flower, after the Disney character from Bambi, though only her gender prevented a moniker of Pepe Le Pew I warmed canned milk mixed with water and fed Flower every few hours, teaching her to suckle a squeeze bottle I'd salvaged from a Toni home permanent kit. I rose to feed her when she cried at night, stroked her stomach patiently to stimulate her little bowels and kept her box toasty warm with hot water bottles, seemingly oblivious to the fact that I was rearing what amounted to vermin in a community devoted and committed to killing vermin.
Perhaps the novelty of wild animals was enough to earn them asylum, or perhaps it was their baby features, the rounded ears and helpless mewling, that made grown-ups carry them home rather than brain them outright. They had to be allowed to grow up before one could honorably kill them, it seemed, or at least given a chance to refuse domestication. My mother tells the story of how, as a small child, she managed to capture a baby gopher. She found a box and made it a nest, offered up a variety of victuals a little gopher might enjoy. He was a cute little fellow, but when she scooped him up to play with him, the ungrateful thing bit her on the finger. So she fed him to her tomcat.
When the cute wore off the wild animals I raised, they had to find new homes. Flower left with my teacher Mae Bibeau when school was out that spring, and though never descented she made a nice pet until she was shot by a varmint-hunting neighbor. The fawn, given to a ranch near the highway, survived until hunting season the next fall, when even her missing foot and a red bow around her neck couldn't save her.
It seems strange to me now that just as I never questioned my motives in rearing these orphans, no one ever doubted our right to do as we wished with the creatures that shared our land. Imagine the life of little Jack the Rabbit—any one of a dozen we caught in the woodpile or rescued from a prowling cat who aimed to offer him up, frightened but alive, to her half-grown kittens for hunting practice. Bundled to the house, the new Jack is soon ensconced in an apple crate with a door of wire mesh that's a bare fraction too small to admit a cat's paw, though the owners of such paws give it a whirl whenever no one's watching. When they can, the cats terrorize him through the mesh and he huddles bug-eyed at the back of the crate until we shoo them away.
In spite of the lodgings, he manages to recover from his superficial injuries within a few days. We pull grass for him to eat and offer garden leavings, and keep a tin can of water weighted with rocks in a corner of the cage. He eats and drinks. He sits in his tiny cage in the porch watching the cats watching him. Jack is a good-sized bunny when we decide to set him free a few weeks later. Dad loads us all into the back of the pickup and we ride with Jack's cage to the wheat fields west of the house, rabbit paradise. We form a stately procession into the rows of green winter wheat and open the door of the cage. There's a pause.
"How will we know him from the other jackrabbits?" one of us asks. Dad thinks a moment, then slides out his pocketknife. Reaching down, he grabs Jack's right ear and with one swift movement cuts off the tip. The rabbit squeals once and bounds for freedom bearing the right crop earmark our cattle wear.
Looking back over the tailgate as we bounded the short road home, I remember feeling intensely proud to have rescued the jackrabbit, tended it and now returned it to the wild. At no time did I or anyone around me question how Jack might have fared in this reunion with nature—Jack, a half-grown rabbit with senses and reflexes dulled from his weeks in a cage, wounded, sprinkled with fresh blood, and loosed among the predators at sunset. I imagine Jack's fate was swift and sure, its onset merely delayed by the days spent on our porch.
Still, the novelty of caring for an injured fawn or hatching some orphaned duck eggs made a break from our routine chores, and while their eventual fates changed little, there was always room for hope. And in any case, it was better than getting attached to a member of that other group of animals that populated our life—the poultry, cattle and pigs that lived for the sole purpose of dying and becoming meat. Some things are not safe to love, and like most children raised around livestock, I learned emotional detachment as a form of common sense. My first direct lesson, when I was nine or ten years old, concerned Pet, a young rooster. I had been given the chicken chores for the first time that spring, not just the feeding and egg gathering of the older hens, but the more challenging job of tending the baby chicks that arrived in the mail. In the days before their arrival, we scrubbed out the water founts, put down clean sand in the little brooder house, and then lit the gas brooder, checking the thermometer every few hours to make sure the temperature remained even: too cold, and the chicks would pile up under the brooder and suffocate; too hot, and they would wilt with dehydration. We waited for a call from the post office telling us when the chicks arrived. Sometimes we drove to Malta to get them, and sometimes they caught the Regina mail as far as our local post office.
The chicks were shipped in flat cardboard crates with holes punched in the sides, one hundred freshly hatched chicks in each crate. In the brooder house, we lifted them out one at a time and gently dipped each beak in a water fount to teach them how to drink. The first couple of weeks, I spent hours watching and tending the little flock. A dusting of reddish fluff had allowed me to pick Pet out of the swarm of plain yellow chicks early on. As the summer progressed and I spent more and more time with my band of gentle chickens, I continued to pick him out for special favors. By the time they were old enough to be turned outside, Pet was as domestic as a chicken can get. He ran to meet me when he saw me coming, and I swear he raised his wings like a small child lifts its arms to be picked up. In the heat of the afternoon, he climbed into my lap and dozed as I sat in the shade of the granary. I swiped food from the refrigerator to feed him, and he learned to pick my pockets.
Mom had told us stories of the little bantam hens she had kept as a child, and she seemed bemused when I wandered by with this large, obliging bird under my arm. Still, she was not unaware of the position I was taking. "You know what's going to happen," she warned, and of course in some part of my mind I did. Roosters were called fryers for a reason. I suppose I answered her with a tough-girl shrug.
That fall we waited until the last butchering to kill him, though he'd grown to roasting size by then. I carried his jerking, headless body from the chopping block to the steaming bucket under the cottonwoods. Wordlessly, Mom grabbed him by the feet and dunked him in the scalding water. Pet's destiny had never been in doubt from the moment he set foot under the brooder, and her business-as-usual actions bore this out. She rubbed a thumb up one drumstick, testing and dipping until the feathers slid easily from the skin, then she handed him back to me for plucking. I would not have had to do this, but I remember thinking it was necessary to perform these actions myself,
the same way a man has to put down a faithful old dog or shoot his own horse if it breaks a leg. In this way, I saw Pet through. Naked and footless, his carcass stiffened into meat and merged with a dozen others bobbing in the washtub of cold water. When I turned away and looked back, I could no longer tell which body was his.
Late that afternoon, the butchering long over, I sorted through the pile of severed heads beside the huge cottonwood stump that served as our chopping block. Dozens of them littered the ground. The fresh ones looked nearly alive. The ones from previous days had dried to five-pointed stars—beaks open, comb and wattles dried stiff, feathers hardened to points at the neck. I turned over the heads of my flock, one at a time, until I spotted the familiar pattern of rust-colored feathers. I squatted for a moment without touching him, aware of a tingling in my belly, like electricity, that made my muscles feel weak. Finally, afraid of being caught, I spread a threadbare washcloth on the ground, placed Pet's head firmly in the center, and wrapped it up like I would wrap a doll in a blanket.
I palmed the flat, cold package and stood, glancing around to be sure I was not observed. It was certainly possible to get in trouble for taking the washcloth, but I believe my deepest fear was of being caught in the ludicrous act of mourning a chicken. I kept Pet's head tightly bound, unwilling or unable to meet the gaze of his half-lidded eyes, and held his quiet burial in our pet cemetery behind the woodpile. In the end, it was less a tough lesson than an embarrassing one. Any idiot knew better than to get attached to a chicken, for pity's sake! The only surprise was that I had not stopped myself.
In the years that followed, I picked feathers off a hundred chickens, said my good-byes to a dozen milk pen calves and nonchalantly carried the gut pail to the house at the butchering of Curly and Lacy, a pair of clever little weaner pigs Grandpa Blunt had given us kids to fatten. Even with horses and cats, there was no guarantee that illness or accident would not carry them off, and so I took deliberate measures to keep my tender feelings to myself. By the time I was twelve, I felt immune to sentimentality of any sort. But somehow between twelve and thirteen I stumbled; there was Ajax.
In the one photo I have of the two of us, it is a gray spring day, and I am zipped up in the winter coat I will wear straight through the summer and into eighth grade. Over that armor, my face is cocky, my chin tipped at a rakish, almost defiant angle. I am sitting astride a big yearling steer, proud of us both, because I no longer have to plow-rein him or pull his big head around by one rein to get him to turn around the arena. He's learning to neck-rein like a cutting horse, responding to the light touch of the reins along his neck and the nudge of my feet along his ribs. Ajax faces the camera with his head up and his ears flipped forward, reins slack on his neck. His Angus sire is revealed in his rich black coloring, his solid, shiny hide blending into the shadow of trees behind the feed-lot. The white star on his forehead, the long legs and gawky face are gifts from his Holstein mother. He's over a year old, a coming two-year-old, and by ranch definitions my butt is planted directly over his T-bone steaks. My heels dangle by his short ribs. My eyes are dangerously empty.
I began breaking Ajax to ride when he was a youngster, the ugly duckling of the milk pen calves. They all got a workout, but Ajax loomed head and shoulders taller than the orphaned range calves that shared his mother's milk, and by virtue of size and temperament, he won the largest share of my time. Had he not been half dairy stock, he would have disappeared in the fall and I would have thought no more about him. But purebred still ruled the market then. Stockmen raised Hereford or Angus, or they crossed the two breeds, using Angus bulls and Hereford cows to create Black Baldy calves.
When it came time to sell, stock growers were at the mercy of the open market, whose trends and mysteries were interpreted, predicted and explained by those middlemen known as cattle buyers. Three or four cattle buyers worked our community, drifting through to test the waters in late summer. Arriving in a mud-spattered Cadillac, a buyer moved first to the kitchen to talk weights and prices, weather and market trends, over coffee. Then rancher and buyer climbed into a pickup for the drive through the herd. Buyers developed a shrewd eye for livestock, and often could accurately predict the weaning weights of calves while they were still in the fields. The cattle buyers all had feedlot customers back in Iowa or Nebraska somewhere, and though they competed with each other for our calf crops, they all had the same goal: to purchase calves from many ranches and have them all look like siblings when they were sorted into feedlot-sized groups.
Nature being what it is, not every calf fit the load. On shipping day, the buyer himself often stood in the cutting alley with a stock whip giving the thumbs-up or thumbs-down to each calf as it came toward him. A side pen gradually filled with the cutbacks. There were practical reasons for some of the cuts—usually age and size were the determining factors. Calves born too late or too early in the season might not do as well in a feeding program designed for a particular stage of growth and development. But often cosmetic differences were enough to earn a thumbs-down. A calf with its ears or tail frozen round or one that had sprouted a stubby horn after a bad dehorning job likely found itself in the cull pen. There it might be joined by other perfectly normal, perfectly proportioned, perfectly healthy Hereford calves that were born with some variation of the standard Hereford markings: red necks, line-backs, white splashes above the knees. These purely aesthetic culls were argued endlessly, but the buyer had the last say.
In a market where buyers demanded uniform loads of identical calves, my dog-gentle, half-Holstein milk penner fit no one's idea of a feeder calf. True to his breeding, by weaning time Ajax stood.a foot taller than his beefy pen mates. Against all reason or breeding, he retained a model temperament, despite the persistent human who fit him with harnesses and disturbed his drowsy afternoons with rodeo games. For years I had longed for a colt to train, and I suppose it was that passion and energy that I spent on Ajax. All summer, as I climbed into the corral he separated himself from his buddies and trotted happily to meet me, snaking his long black tongue out to hook the green grass I offered in one hand like a farmer's bouquet, ignoring the latest bridle or harness contraption I held in the other. He stood placidly, eyelids drooping over dark liquid eyes, tail swinging idly at the occasional fly, while I made adjustments to the rigging, for he was continually outgrowing his gear. When I swung aboard, he waited to be prodded into action. As I drummed my heels to counter his passive resistance, we circled the corral reining a lopsided figure eight in the soft dirt. Other times, I hooked his harness to an old tire and drove him like a cart pony.
When weaning was over that autumn, he and the other cutbacks were turned out to pasture for a couple of months and I turned to other interests. His baling twine bridles, halters and harnesses hung from nails in the rafters of the old pig house, forgotten.
The young replacement heifers, destined to become herd cows, and the culled steers, destined to become meat, spent the coldest months of the winter in the feedlot behind our house. Early that winter, I walked to the well house and turned on the water, waiting in the sunny shelter of the building as water rose to fill the feedlot tank. Ice rimmed the edges. An axe leaned against a support pole, and for something to do, I picked it up, stepped over the stile into the feedlot and began breaking ice loose from the wooden tank. I was leaning to reach the ice buildup under the tank cover when a blast of compressed air hit the back of my neck with a loud chuff. The axe hit the water with a splash and I wheeled around, automatically swinging one arm to fend off whatever beast had cornered me. Ajax fell backward a few steps and then stood blinking stupidly as I caught my breath. Again he extended his leathery black nose with bovine curiosity, another sniff-sniff-CHUFF confirming my scent. My heart was still thundering, my voice louder than necessary.
"You stupid sonofabitch!" He gazed at me expectantly, his tongue sliding over his muzzle to clean first one nostril, then the other. When I continued speaking, he stepped forward, head nodding. Submissive. Waiting
for something to eat. What a memory he has, I thought, as I slipped my coat and gloves off and rolled up my sleeves. Turning my back to him again, I gritted my teeth, reached into the icy water and fished the axe out of the reeking muck at the bottom of the tank. I kept up the conversation, describing his parentage and personal faults, and when I turned around, he had moved within arm's reach, still licking his chops. If he had been a dog, he would have been wagging his tail and laughing. I used his broad back as a towel, wiping my arm dry on his thick black winter coat. He scratched against me, nearly knocking me over. My God, he had gotten big. My arm could barely reach over him. He shone with health, his back wavy with swaths of spit curls where he had been grooming himself, a sure sign of bovine well-being.
At some point during the next few weeks I began carrying barley-cake, the cubes we fed to the range cows, in my pockets. When the weather allowed, I changed clothes after school and wandered over to the feedlot. If he wasn't bedded down staying warm, I'd yell, "Hey, 'Jax," and he'd lumber out of the group and come to meet me, licking his lips. At some point during the next few weeks, I dragged his old bridles out of storage and brought them over to the feedlot, grinning as I held them up to his huge head. I took two of the old halters apart and made one from the braided twine. I bent No. 9 wire into a snaffle bit. Toward spring, I led him out of sight behind the windbreak and swung astride. He looked back at me sitting on his back, puzzled perhaps, or remembering, and moved out, head nodding, when I touched my heels to his ribs. I think it was then, that very moment, that I gave up pretending to myself.